Film, particularly 35mm, is having a renaissance. This post was conceived while editing the two images below. After returning to shooting film a few years ago, I've done a few side by side comparisons of the results from film vs digital. I've cut back on those experiments after recognizing that I ended up with too many of essentially the same image, where the film version has a tangible cost in the postage, film, processing and scanning that can be calculated down to the individual frame.
Consider the two images below, same date, about the same time, with similar perspectives, although with different Canon lenses and bodies.
Sanibel Island Light
Sanibel Island, Florida
November 2018
Version 1
Body - EOS 1v
Lens - EF 135mm f/2L USM
Film - Kodak Portra 400
Exposure - 1/1000 at f/6.3, ISO 400
Sanibel Lighthouse on film by
Paul Sager, on Flickr
Version 2
Body - EOS 5DIII
Lens - EF 35mm f/1.4L USM
Exposure - 1/100 at f/9, ISO 100
Sanibel Lighthouse by
Paul Sager, on Flickr
I've been back into film now for a few years after inheriting a Canon AE-1. The AE-1 dates to sometime in the mid 1970s. I began investigating available film bodies that took me in a few directions before landing on my preferred option, an EOS 1v. The drawback of the manual focus lenses on the AE-1 is that I can't manually focus as accurately as letting the camera and lens auto focus when using an EOS body. The manual focus film cameras just don't have an EVF and 100% digital zoom that my eyes need now from a mirrorless body with manual focus lenses.
For me, what has been exciting about film is the
types of film available. As a niche market, really only the highest quality professional film types remain available. I ran a roll of Kodak Ektar through my high school graduation Canon T50 and had better images from that body and the FD 50mm f/1.8 "kit lens" than I had ever created in the years of shooting from the early 80s to the late 90s. I hope my skills have improved after years of digital, but the types of film are better than what you could buy cheap at most any drugstore back in the day.
A crop of the two versions of the Sanibel Lighthouse occurs below. The processing and scanning of the film image, from North Coast Photography Services of Carlsbad, California, returns virtually dust-free JPEGs at 5035x3339-pixels, roughly the resolution of a 16MP digital camera. The scanned files are then processed in Lightroom to achieve the desired end-result.
Below is a side by side crop of the details from the two images. The details show a few considerations:
1) The different pixel resolution (16MP of the scan vs 22MP of the DLSR) provide different options for cropping into the details of the image. I didn't try to maintain the same pixel dimensions of the two crops where the film crop shows poorer in this side by side comparison.
2) The film grain is emphasized by the crop.
3) The color and shadow details are relatively consistent between the two images.
My involvement in film is not to recreate digital images using film. Rather, I use film for the challenge of slowly framing and determining exposure for an image that needs to be captured near perfect in 1 try rather than shooting, considering, adjusting and continuing to shoot in digital. Although here at Sanibel I had both a film body and digital body and shared lenses between the bodies, I tried for most of 2018 to go out with only one type of camera, film or digital, and no longer bringing both bodies where the near same image in both format is likely to occur (like this example).
The color film results, such as the case of Kodak Portra 400 above, is remarkably similar to the digital result. Using of software filters on digital images likely could create virtually identical results with the 'look' of Kodak Portra 400. The similarity of the results between color film and digital is a reason I primarily use black and white film. Of the several color films I've experimented with, Kodak Ektar delivers images that seem more unique to film, an observation to be continued in part II. I intend to post a 5-part series over the next days looking at different aspects of shooting 35mm film now in 2019 based on my own experiences and example images.
The images are sized to fill your wide-screen display. Try using <F11> to maximize your browser window for the full effect. If the images overshoot your display, such as a laptop, just click on the image or the URL link and they'll resize to your screen from the host Flickr site. You can click a bit further into the image details on the Flickr page, if desired. EXIF data is available from the host Flickr pages as well. On the Flickr site, use your <L>key for Large and the <F11> for the full-screen.
If the images are not filling your widescreen display due to recent UHH changes, follow this link and update your UHH profile:
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-572300-1.html